Thursday, August 28, 2008

Come Back, Salmon (The Theory of Alienation Explained)

The success of fish farming has made traditional salmon fishing obsolete.

The German journalist and philosopher Karl Marx was far too fuzzy: "If the product of labor is alienation, then production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the objects of labor is summed up the estrangement, the alienation of the laboring activity itself."

Maybe something gets lost in translation there, but my buddy Andrew Struthers, he of First Church of Christ, Filmmaker, explains it perfectly: "This is Dave's boat. This is the bank that owns it now. This is Dave's wife, leaving him. Now, he works in the fish plant, canning the very same salmon that put him out of business. Once, he spent the day looking forward to the blue horizon. Now the only thing he has to look forward to is the next smoke break."

All here, in A Horrific Industrial Accident At A Fish Plant, Circa 1940: